Alex Williams

Author Archives: Alex Williams

How Your Network Impacts User Experience in a COVID-19 World

Before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, massive-scale remote connections over the Internet to households largely consisted of connections to entertainment services, such as Netflix. For those types of symmetric connections, fast download times ensure a good service. However, once the pandemic started, users working from home lacked sufficient upload times that could be at least 10 times slower for uploading data. This quickly became problematic for work-related connections, such as video and even audio connections for web meetings, said

Where Service Mesh and SmartNICs Meet

Intel sponsored this post. Smart Network Interface Controllers (SmartNICS) puts the service mesh at center stage where the network and the application layer meet. The new dimensions that come with the integration of hardware and software is ushering in a new generation of capabilities such as cryptographic operations and new approaches to resource utilization. At VMworld last month, VMware featured SmartNICs as part of